The Temple of Augustus: The Oldest Stone in Barcelona, Hidden in a Courtyard

There is a doorway on Carrer del Paradís, a narrow lane behind the cathedral, that thousands of people walk past every day. Number 10. Step through it into the little courtyard and look up, and you are standing under the oldest thing in Barcelona: four Corinthian columns from a Roman temple carved in the late first century before the Common Era, before Christ was born. In a Gothic Quarter that is mostly a twentieth-century stage set, these columns are the one thing that is exactly as old as it looks. The Barri Gòtic tour stops here for exactly that reason.

What you are standing under

Four enormous fluted Corinthian columns rise about nine metres from the courtyard floor to the ceiling, the acanthus leaves at their capitals deeply and sharply carved. Per the MUHBA Temple d'August page and the record of the Temple of Augustus in Barcelona, they are the surviving fragment of a temple dedicated to the emperor Augustus. It sat at the summit of Mons Taber, the small rise at the exact geographic heart of Roman Barcino. The temple was hexastyle, six columns across the front, with roughly 34 columns in total, about 37 metres long and 17 metres wide, and it dominated the northern end of the forum, the Roman public square, whose site is a couple of minutes away.

Only four columns survive of the original thirty-something. Three were rediscovered in the late nineteenth century during the construction of the building around them, which became the headquarters of the Centre Excursionista de Catalunya. The fourth had been displayed earlier in Plaça del Rei and was later moved here to complete the group. The MUHBA runs the site now, and entry is free.

The city that grew around them

The reason to slow down here is the timeline these columns have watched. Augustus founded the colony on this hill and named it, in full, Colonia Iulia Augusta Faventia Paterna Barcino. The Romans walled it, about a kilometre and a half of perimeter around some ten and a half hectares, and built the forum and this temple. By the late fourth century the Romans had gone. Then came the Visigoths, then the Moors, then the Franks, then a Catalan county. In 1298 the cathedral foundations were laid two blocks north. In 1453 Santa Maria del Pi was consecrated three blocks west. In 1887 the cathedral got its neo-Gothic façade. In 1928 a footbridge was built over Carrer del Bisbe. In 1938 the Italian Legionary Aviation bombed Sant Felip Neri.

These columns were already ancient when every one of those things happened. That is close to two thousand years, standing on the same spot, now indoors, inside a fifteenth-century building, inside a nineteenth-century institution, inside a twenty-first-century municipal museum. The stone is the same stone Roman hands cut between roughly 15 and 10 years before the Common Era.

Why this stop anchors the tour

The tour's larger argument is that the Barri Gòtic is a manufactured medieval quarter, assembled between about 1908 and 1943 out of relocated buildings, stripped façades, and new neo-Gothic construction. The full case is in the Gothic Quarter stage-set companion. Against that backdrop, the Temple of Augustus is the control sample: not moved, not restyled, not invented. Its authenticity is the measuring stick that lets you see how much of the surrounding "medieval" city is younger than your grandparents.

What to do here

Go inside. It is free, it is quiet, and it is easy to miss. Touch the stone if the site allows it. Then, back on the street, look at the "medieval" façades around you with the columns fresh in your mind, and start guessing which are genuinely old and which were dressed to look that way. The columns give you the calibration. The rest of the tour teaches you to use it.

Keep exploring Barcelona

Read the full argument in the Gothic Quarter stage-set, or see all the routes in the guide to the best self-guided walking tours in Barcelona.